[extropy-chat] Blog spam

[Emlyn]

I went into the settings area for http://virtualemlyn.blogspot.com, to
turn off comments, giving up. Lo! There is a new option!

"Show word verification for comments? "

This option means that when posting a comment, you not only have to
log in, but you also have to type a word shown to you as a funky,
messed up image which is far too difficult for OCR. Those things work
pretty well, I reckon, to defeat bots. I'll try it.

I was thinking about such systems a while back, and figured a good
comment spam bot could beat them, by having a server side system where
it could register the image. The server system then farms up the image
to a real human being as part of the entry to a free porn site or free
mp3 site or something equally banal. The human solves the problem, the
server system takes the answer and gives it back to the comment spam
bot, the bot submits it to the blog, and voila! play on spammers.

I wonder if this has been done yet?

--
Emlyn

http://emlynoregan.com   * blogs * music * software *